The Konrad Zuse School of Excellence in Reliable AI has held its first retreat, bringing together students and fellows in Garmisch to meet and foster collaboration. The School has also received a new website with information on the fellows from LMU and TUM, academic partners, industry partners, and a now-open call for the next cohort of PhD students.

The Machine Learning Consulting Unit (MLCU) is part of the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) and offers applied researchers scientific consulting regarding the application and evaluation of machine learning methods to researchers in applied sciences, for example, medicine, psychology, biology, and others. Consulting is free of charge for members of the MCML and the LMU. The MLCU also welcomes joint research projects with the goal of publication and other forms of cooperation.

The Plattform Lernende Systeme, chaired by Minister of Education and Research Bettina Stark-Watzinger, has been promoting interdisciplinary exchange and social dialog on artificial intelligence in Germany for five years. It consists of seven working groups totaling around 200 scientists. Prof. Dr. Volker Tresp has been appointed to lead the AG1 "Technology and Data Science" jointly with Prof. Dr. Ute Schmid from the University of Bamberg

Amoebae are single-cell organisms. By means of self-organization, they can form complex structures – and do this purely through local interactions. "The phenomenon is well known," says Prof. Dr. Erwin Frey from LMU's Faculty of Physics. "Before now, however, no research group has investigated how information processing, at a general level, affects the aggregation of systems of agents when individual agents – in our case, amoebae – are self-propelled." More knowledge about these mechanisms would also be interesting, adds Frey, as regards translating them to artificial technical systems.

Although tumors in the nasal cavity and the paranasal sinus are confined to a small space, they encompass a very broad spectrum with many tumor types. As they often do not exhibit any specific pattern or appearance, they are difficult to diagnose. Now a team led by Dr. Philipp Jurmeister and Prof. Dr. Frederick Klauschen from the Institute of Pathology at LMU and Prof. Dr. David Capper from Charité University Hospital as well as the German Cancer Consortium has achieved a decisive improvement in diagnostics. The team developed an AI tool that reliably distinguishes tumors on the basis of chemical DNA modifications and assigns them to four clearly distinct groups.

We wish you all a happy holiday season. This newsletter will take a brief winter break next month. We will be back on February 1.

The Institute of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Management is running the AI Keynotes series this winter semester. The weekly sessions on Thursdays aim to give an overview of current trends in AI research and are also available via Zoom. The series is a joint initiative led by LMU Munich (Prof. Dr. Stefan Feuerriegel) and co-hosts from leading national universities all over the world. This month will feature talks from Prof. Dr. Ingmar Weber (Saarland University) about Societal Computing, Prof. Dr. Foster Provost (New York University, Stern) on Causal Targeting, and Prof. Dr. Zachary Lipton, (Carnegie Mellon University)

The Center for Advanced Studies will hold a panel discussion on "Writing with Artificial Intelligence". The panel will feature Prof. Dr. Barbara Plank, Prof. Dr. Mario Haim, Uli Köppen, and Prof. Dr. Hinrich Schütze and be moderated by Prof. Dr. Frauke Kreuter on December 1 at 5:15 pm.

As part of the BERD Academy, there will be an in-person workshop titled "A Connected World: Data Analysis for Real-World Network Data"  at LMU on December 8. The workshop will focus on the growing topic of "connectedness" of networks,  in particular, exploring data about international political interactions.